Mostly for ordinary reasons: undercharging, avoiding negotiation, treating money as spiritually contaminating, and substituting intention-setting for planning. And one structural point the genre inverts — being short of money impairs decision-making, rather than poor thinking causing the shortage. The causal arrow points the other way from how it is usually sold.
Is there really a pattern here?
Among people who work in or around this field, yes — and it is worth separating from the broader question of why anyone is broke, which is mostly about wages, housing costs, health and where you were born.
What is specific to this world is a set of beliefs that make earning harder: that charging properly compromises the work, that wanting money indicates a lower level of development, that abundance arrives through alignment rather than invoicing, and that negotiating is a form of aggression. None of those is universal here. All of them are common enough to be recognisable.
The general case for engaging with this honestly rather than avoiding it is in the guide to spirituality and money. This page is about the specific mechanisms.
What does the scarcity research actually show?
This is the finding that reorders the whole discussion.
Poverty impedes cognitive function (Science, 2013) reported that financial strain itself consumes cognitive capacity — that being preoccupied with money problems measurably degrades performance on unrelated reasoning tasks. Not because poor people think badly, but because a live financial threat occupies the same bandwidth that everything else needs.
If that holds, the mindset framing has the causation backwards. Bad financial decisions under strain are a consequence of the strain, not the cause of it. That reframes an enormous amount of moralising about why people stay broke.
Being straight about the state of the evidence: this paper was influential and it was contested. There is a published Comment disputing the analysis and a Response from the authors, both in Science. Some subsequent replication attempts have been mixed. Treat the effect as real, plausibly smaller than first reported, and genuinely under discussion. I would rather point you at the argument than pretend it is settled.
| Claim | Evidence strength |
|---|---|
| Financial strain consumes cognitive bandwidth | Influential finding, contested in published exchange |
| Assertiveness is trainable and raises self-esteem | Good — RCT evidence |
| Perceived lack of control increases pattern-seeking | Strong — replicated |
| Money blocks are stored in an energy centre | No evidence. See the honest version |
| Thoughts or vibration attract income | No evidence |
| Poverty results primarily from individual mindset | Not supported. Structural factors dominate |
The actual mechanisms
Undercharging as a virtue. The most common one. Prices set below sustainability, then framed as accessibility or non-attachment. The consequence is that the work is subsidised by your own precarity, and precarious people eventually stop doing the work.
Not asking. Raises, rates, invoices, overdue payments. This is not a money problem, it is an assertiveness problem, and assertiveness responds to training. It is also the highest-leverage thing on this list.
Manifestation displacing planning. Time spent on vision boards and alignment is time not spent on pricing, outreach and negotiation. The activity feels productive, which is exactly what makes it costly.
Signs instead of decisions. Deciding by omen when the stakes are high — and high stakes are precisely when low perceived control produces more pattern perception. The signs arrive most reliably when you are least able to evaluate them.
Avoiding the numbers. Not knowing your monthly figures, unopened statements, no forecast. Avoidance is comfortable and it is what makes small problems into large ones.
Clearing blocks instead of changing behaviour. Sessions to remove money blocks are a real market and there is no evidence any of it affects income.
What to do about it
- Find your actual numbers this week. Income, fixed costs, the gap. One page. Unpleasant, and everything else depends on it.
- Raise one price by twenty per cent. On new clients only, so nothing is at risk. Gather data instead of arguing with yourself.
- Ask for one thing. A rate, an overdue invoice, a raise. Once. Plainly, without justification — the justification is what invites negotiation down.
- Sit through the discomfort afterwards. Sixty seconds of not filling the silence. The discomfort is the practice, not a sign you have done something wrong.
- Convert any manifestation time into contact time. Same hours, spent on people who could pay you. Keep the practice if you like it, and stop counting it as work.
- Automate one saving transfer. Small and immediate. Automated behaviour survives bad months; intention does not.
- Separate ethics from pricing. Decide what you will not do for money as an actual list. Then price the rest properly — the honest version of trading a practice covers what that looks like.
What I had to change
I had a good story about why I charged what I charged, and it took an ungracious amount of evidence to see it was a story.
My rates were low and I described this as keeping the work accessible. What was actually happening was that quoting a real number produced a specific, physical reluctance — the same one I get before any difficult sentence — and the low rate meant I never had to feel it. Accessibility was the explanation I had reached for afterwards, and it was flattering enough that I never examined it.
The test that broke it was cheap. I raised the number for new enquiries only and left everything else alone. I expected a drop in volume. There was a small one and it was concentrated among people who had also been the most demanding, which was not the result I predicted.
The thing I would tell anyone in this position is that the reluctance did not go away. I still get it. What changed is that I stopped reading it as an ethical signal, because it fires identically whether the price is fair or unfair — which means it carries no information about the price at all.
What this page is not claiming
That being broke is a mindset problem. It is mostly not. Wages, housing, illness, caring responsibilities, debt and where you started determine most of it, and no amount of pricing confidence outruns a structural situation.
Everything above applies to the specific case of someone whose beliefs about money are costing them income they could otherwise have. That is a real and addressable subset, and it is not the whole picture. Anyone selling you the idea that your finances are purely a reflection of your consciousness is selling the prosperity gospel with different vocabulary — and blaming people for their circumstances is the oldest move in it.
What the evidence doesn’t support
- That money blocks exist as energetic structures. Nothing to measure, nothing to clear.
- That thoughts attract income. No evidence, and it makes financial hardship a personal failing.
- That charging less is more ethical. Unsustainable pricing removes the service entirely, which helps nobody.
- That wealth indicates spiritual alignment. The correlation with inherited advantage is considerably stronger — the fuller argument is in the piece on the law of compensation.
- That poverty is a spiritual lesson. No evidence, and it functions to make an unjust situation feel meaningful to people who are not in it.
Frequently asked questions
Is it wrong to charge for spiritual work?
No. Every tradition has had to solve the problem of supporting its practitioners, and unpaid work is either subsidised by someone or it stops. The real questions are about honesty and what you claim it does.
How do I know if my price is too low?
If it does not cover your costs plus your time at a rate you could sustain for years, it is too low. That is an arithmetic question, and it is a different one from what you feel comfortable saying out loud.
Does clearing money blocks work?
There is no evidence it affects income. The reflection prompts sometimes surface something useful about your actual behaviour, which you can get for free.
What if I genuinely do not care about money?
Then this page is not for you, and that is a legitimate position — provided it is a choice rather than an explanation for an avoidance. The test is whether you can name your numbers.
General information, not financial advice. If you are in financial difficulty, a regulated debt adviser is the right resource. Sourcing standards are in the editorial policy.
